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March 15, 2004
Playing it Stereotyped
Fox's latest bachelorette reality show, Playing it Straight, premiered last Friday night. The premise of the show (bachelorette has to pick one of 15 men, some of whom are secretly gay) and the ridiculous assumptions about sexuality that follow, piqued my interest enough to watch it. The show makes it extra tricky for the audience, the other bachelors, and for Jackie the Bachelorette to identify the gay plants (insert "pansy" joke here) among the straight contestants, by selecting men who have some "straight" (i.e. butch, sports-related, macho) elements as well as some "gay" personality traits. These are all over the place, but the ways the bios are constructed (see website link above), the traits we are supposed to identify as gay include: "obsessed with his hair", "Cher fan", "shaves his legs", some inexplicable ones like "plays miniature golf", and the especially absurd "vacations in San Francisco".
The bachelorette, Jackie, is from Wisconsin and says she was on the Student Life and Diversity Commission while in college. I'm not sure how much diversity Jackie was exposed to while in school, because her criteria for evaluating sexuality need a lot of work if she is going to land a man who will return her affections at the end of the show. So far she has dismissed two men who she assumed to be gay, and both turned out to be straight. Here was her reasoning for each one: Gust, the real estate agent who loves styling hair, was sort of distant from Jackie, and also little creepy. Hey, he must be gay! Given that the rules of the show state that if Jackie picks a gay man as her final selection at the end of the show, the guy gets a million bucks and she gets nothing, I would expect that the gay contestants are going to be anything but distant from Jackie. They'll be all over her, working to prove their hetero-desire, right? Of course. Jackie doesn't understand this, and also hasn't noticed that for the most part, it's the straight men of the world who have cornered the market on creepiness.
She also dismissed Louis, a stock broker who writes poetry, because when she came into the guys' room and asked to borrow a hair dryer, he was the only one who volunteered his. Because only gay men dry their hair, RIGHT?
If Jackie were to wise up, she'd realize that what she needs to do to evaluate the guys' sexualities is to behave in a wildly lascivious way with them, rubbing herself all over them and making out with them as often as possible to gauge their reactions, which, coincidentally, would make for some very good television. Previews for future episodes indicate that she also works some games where she makes the men kiss each other while in a hot tub together. The premiere didn't inspire much confidence, but it looks like Jackie's going to figure a few things out soon, and this show might actually live up to its potential.
